Ep. 114: Can't Identify Your Feelings? You Might Have Alexithymia—The Unspeaking Heart

If you’ve ever felt unsure what you want, relied on logic where feeling should guide you, or wondered why emotions seem elusive, this post is for you. Alexithymia—“the unspeaking heart”—is not a lack of feeling, but a learned and often inherited difficulty accessing it. Drawing on research, clinical insight, and everyday examples, this piece examines how emotions become blocked, the quiet costs of living without emotional clarity, and how the heart can relearn to speak through awareness, therapy, and practice.

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  📍 📍 📍 📍 Some people have difficulty knowing what they feel and saying what they feel.

It might seem like they have no feeling, but more often it's that they can't identify the feelings they do have, and they don't have words for. This condition is known clinically as alexithymia, meaning no words for feelings.

More literally and more movingly translated, it means an unspeaking heart

. And if you're rolling your eyes right now, you're the exact person that needs to 📍 hear this.

One study indicates that as much as thirteen percent of the general population has alexithymia. That's a lot of people walking around who don't know what they want.

  📍 I'm Gary Trosclair, psychotherapist, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of The Healthy Compulsive project book, blog, and podcast.

Do that again. Today, I want to discuss a topic that can sometimes stump therapists Frustrate partners and leave you feeling at a loss for words and everything they express. So please join me for episode one hundred and fourteen of the Healthy Compulsive Project podcast. Can't identify your feelings? You may have alexithymia, the unspeaking heart. And for those of you who listen on YouTube, this podcast now has video with cool things like chapter headings, captions, and occasional images and charts.

 Getting back to our subject, it's not that people with alexithymia have no feelings, as if there's some huge empty cavern inside of them.

In fact, we'll find out that to some degree it's the opposite. Alexithymia is associated with higher intensity of feeling. But it is certain that the path to feelings is blocked. They just aren't accessible.

People who have alexithymia can't identify or describe to themselves or others the feelings that they have. The heart can't speak. While the heart has the right to remain silent, that silence results in not knowing what you want, and you may turn to other sources for guidance. We'll get to that and other results of alexithymia soon.

This is not technically a diagnostic term, and the last thing I want for you is to have another label to demean yourself with, but the term may help you to see that it's a thing. The research community is on it. You're not the only one that can't say whether you're feeling infuriated or irritated, repugnance or revulsion, apoplectic or angry.

Alexithymia is partly the result of an emotional strategy that no longer works. It's an aspect of your personality that had had a purpose but now needs balancing because while its original intent was to prevent suffering, it now causes suffering. Let's not put

The Toronto Alexithymia Scale

salt   📍 on the wound.

If you're curious about whether you have alexithymia and you want to take the standard test, It's called the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, and you can find it just about anywhere  online.

My goal in this post is not to be diagnostically precise or comprehensive. And I won't be able to address autism spectrum disorders or trauma and dissociation, the content is complex enough as it is.

We'll proceed by exploring the causes, consequences, and cures for alexithymia. 

📍 First, the

The Causes of Alexithymia

causes. You might be wondering, how did I come to this? Why is my heart not speaking to me? Was this something I said? Not exactly. It's not simple, but I'll try to make it clear. The causes are interrelated, and understanding the loops that they get into will help you to improve your connection to emotion if you decide you want to.

I'll describe the causes in brief first, then in more detail. Here are the three basic ones.

You're born with a certain degree of emotionality, how much you react. Metaphorically, you come with an excitable heart or a calm heart already installed. This is temperament, and it can be observed at birth.

The next one is that you're born with degrees of access to those emotions, higher or lower levels of connection to your heart. That is, whether you're alexithymic or not.

And then the third main cause is that you may suppress or repress your feelings, magnifying your degree of temperament or alexithymia.

You train your heart to either remain silent or to speak.

Now, let's dig deeper. We're gonna talk about the genetic and neurological

Temperament

causes of it.   📍 📍 First temperament, inborn degrees of emotional intensity. How intense our emotions are is determined to some extent by genes. Some people are just more emotional from the get-go, and some of us are less. Ask any parent. These differences are due to neurological factors that shape you even before the world gets its hands on you.  📍

Inheriting Alexithymia

📍 Now Let's talk about inheriting alexithymia, the inborn sensors.

While there's some debate in the research community about whether alexithymia is a stable trait or a reaction to circumstances,  it does seem that there's a genetic or neurological component to it. Forty-two percent, to be precise. But notice, this is not about the intensity of your feelings. This is about accessing them.

It's about how well your heart is connected to your head. Alexithymia doesn't mean an absence of emotion. Contrary to how it might look at first, people who are born with predispositions to alexithymia censor feelings because it's too intense.

They're more likely to have lost connection with the heart because the heart felt so badly that registering it became intolerable early on. This may happen without external distress, but as we'll find out, the external distress makes it even

Environment: Rousing the Censors

worse. 

📍 📍 📍 Now we're gonna talk about magnifying alexithymia, how the environment rouses the sensors.

Let's think of alexithymia as a potential trait. Your environment can either magnify it and its capacity to silence the heart or not affect it. And you may be naturally emotional, but your environment could block those emotions by activating alexithymia.

Or you might not have a large genetic load of alexithymia but need to activate every ounce of what you do have to cope with your environment.

/

Let's look at some of the ways this can happen. First of all, emotions dying on the

Emotions Dying on the Vine

vine. Alexithymia may become your default early on if emotional signals are not named, mirrored, and supported by caregivers early in life.

This can happen if caregivers are neglectful, absent, distracted, or otherwise unable or unwilling to help the child understand and express their feelings. It's just like speech. If you don't hear certain sounds when you're young, like the R in fried, it will be difficult to use it when you're older. You end up saying flied instead.

The consequences of not hearing about emotions are much greater though.  📍

Environments that Discourage the Heart from Speaking

And let's talk about environments that discourage the heart from speaking. If emotions have been mainly negative or hurtful, it's understandable you'd want to turn down the   📍 📍 📍 📍 volume. You may be gifted with the capacity to do this through alexithymia and take full advantage of it.

Or it may be a learned behavior, a strategy you adopted to get along in an inhospitable environment.

Let's look at some of the ways you might have come to shut down your feelings.

Your parents directly discourage you from having feelings, things like saying, " Just because your best friend left doesn't mean you have to be upset. It's over. Quit crying over spilled milk."

Or you might say, "Oh no, I spilled my milk." And then your parent says, "It's just milk. You shouldn't get all upset about spilling it. You should be more reasonable."

Or you say, "But Mommy, I want chocolate milk." Your mother says, "Quit complaining. Poor kids would kill to have that cup of milk." Do that again. "Quit complaining. Poor kids would kill to have that cup of milk."

" Or your parents indirectly discouraged you from having feelings. For instance, if you said, "Mommy, Bertha ignored me at lunch yesterday." She says, "Drink your milk. We have to leave in five minutes."

Or your parents indirectly discouraged you from having feelings by having out-of-control emotions themselves. So your father says, "Don't you ever spill your milk again. What's wrong with you?" So in your mind, you go, "Note to self, don't ever be like that."

In each of these cases, your experiences confirmed what your alexithymic genes have been warning you about all along. Whatever you feel, don't feel it.

Suppression and Repression

Now we'll talk about suppression, repression, and the unspeaking heart. Our next question is, what goes on inside when these things happen?

Are we aware of doing this or not? We humans have craftily evolved many ways to ignore feelings Luckily, psychology has come up with names for the different strategies so that we can understand why we do what we do. These defense mechanisms help us to cope with painful emotions, some of them conscious and some of them unconscious.

Suppression is largely conscious and intentional.

Repression is unconscious and unintentional.

And these protective strategies can be linked.

Let's talk about suppression. It intentionally inhibits emotion. You perceive the emotion , but then decide, aware or maybe just half-aware, to ignore it because it doesn't feel so good.

For instance, you might try to stay calm when you're incensed, tell yourself that something doesn't matter, or distract yourself from heartbreak. But the emotion usually doesn't go away with suppression. You may still be as tense as a high wire as you try to act cool as a cucumber.

Physiological arousal can actually increase even if you don't show it. Your heart pumps more blood, and your brain pumps more hormones.

At times, it's adaptive not to focus on a feeling or express it, but doing so continually can also lead to problems, especially when suppression was learned early on in life and then used habitually.

It starts to feel as if it were as natural and necessary as exhaling, but it's not.

And now repression. When we unconsciously block feelings, we're repressing. Emotional cues can trigger anxiety, shame, or danger that we don't want to feel, so we block these feelings before they rise into awareness. So for instance, you might feel attraction to someone you're not supposed to feel attracted to, so you simply dismiss the disturbing intruder before your heart even gets a whiff of it. You might feel vague arousal or bodily symptoms as this is happening, but you have no idea what they're trying to tell you. The meaning of the emotions is lost.

In the same way that you don't register thousands of bits of sensory data every second, you no longer think about shutting down feeling.

You may start to repress if you habitually suppress. After a while, you forget that you're forgetting. It becomes automatic to censor your anger at your parents, your feelings of hurt, fear, and sadness from your middle school classmates bullying you. So the distinction between repression and suppression is not always clear.

. If you say to yourself, "I won't feel this," it eventually becomes, "I no longer know what I feel."

Desire does not escape the embargo on feeling, so you're left directionless.

We could go on naming the many other defense mechanisms that can activate alexithymia, but we'd run out of stooch before we got to the end of this episode.

Rest assured knowing that if suppression and repression fail you, there are many, many other ways to avoid emotion.

Let's talk about some examples of temperament, alexithymia, suppression, and repression. We're gonna ground this by observing Tanya, Andy, Sam, and Regina as they participate in a breakout group at a workshop.

Oh, dear.

Tanya was never much of one for feeling. She's indifferent to the whole operation. She's only baffled by why people make such a big deal of things. She has had low affect intensity temperament from day one.

Then there's Andy. He's only vaguely aware that he's uncomfortable, but he can't say why. He looks for cues from everybody else about what to do. He has alexithymia.

Now, Sam is annoyed that others all took their sweet time getting to the room where they're meeting, but he chooses not to say so. Still, he feels tight, and he finds it hard to engage in discussion. Other people sense it. He's suppressing, and he may be activating any alexithymia he was born with.

And finally, Regina is not aware that she feels resentment toward the people running the workshop. She doesn't like being told what to do since her parents are very authoritarian. But because any sort of questioning was forbidden, her feelings had to be blocked before reaching consciousness. Similarly, she isn't aware of being triggered now.

She's just wondering what they're serving for lunch. She's repressing and probably has activated any alexithymia she was born with. They had a really jolly good time together.

Perpetuation: Defenses Become Traits

So now let's talk about perpetuation.

These mechanisms of suppression and repression can eventually become traits, an aspect of your personality, and that's more like alexithymia.

Defense mechanisms habitually hardening into a trait is like water freezing into ice.

In actual life, these tendencies run together. Suppression can start as a circumstantial strategy, but over time, the nervous system always reduces access.

‌

Now let's talk about results of living alexithymically. That's not really a word, but it fits.

Results of Living with Alexithymia

Like the causes of alexithymia, the results of it are intertwined and create a self-reinforcing loop. It took me a long time to write this section because it was very much like untying a very complicated knot. There's no single starting place, but I've narrowed it down to six tangled results. Here they are and how they snowball.

Result 1: Disengagement

The first one is that we become more disengaged because feelings are unknowable. Alexithymia can lead to disengagement and more unidentifiable emotions. Because they're unidentifiable, it's understandable that they're going to feel negative and best avoided like an unopened letter from the IRS. You're at a great disadvantage if you can't say what you're feeling, so you duck and dodge.

Think of it this way. If it's hard to understand what a teacher, friend, or therapist is saying and feeling, they may feel very foreign to you and you slowly disengage from them. Disengagement from other people doesn't necessarily mean you trot off to live off the grid. It just may mean that you only relate superficially.

In the same way, if you don't understand your own emotions, you're more likely to disengage from your own heart or just relate to it superficially. Disengagement from others and from your own heart creates a loop.  📍

Result #2: Relationships Suffer

The next one, number two, is that our relationships suffer.

If you have alexithymia, people may experience you as distant, flat, restrained,  uninterested, controlled, or emotionally unavailable. They may not know that you're upset when you're hurt, or when you're lonely, or when you care about someone. It can make you difficult to read and confusing to others because your expressions are indirect, at best.

Not expressing yourself is an expression, whether you like it or not. It sends a message. It's like a butt dial. You're sending a message you don't intend to. And you may not understand the feelings of others if you don't understand your own. For instance, you might be asking yourself, "He looked away after I said that I didn't care, but I don't know how he felt about that."

Further, you may project your own disowned feelings onto others. For instance, you might conclude, "I'm not angry, sad, or brimming with lust. They are."

Perhaps one of the worst results is that it's harder to find empathy for others when we're out of touch with our own

Result 3: Substitute External for Internal

suffering.  📍

The third result is that we substitute external and quantifiable sources of information and direction. We humans are an adaptable lot. We find  other sources for knowing and direction. If we don't know what we want or feel, we quantify and seek advice. For instance, if we don't know whether or not we like our writing, we might say, "How many likes did my post get?"

Or if we don't know whether or not we want a job, we might say, "How much would that new job pay?" And ignore anything we would like or not like about the job itself.

📍 We focus on external facts rather than internal experience.

Or in order to find direction, we look to others. "Everyone on Instagram says St. Barts is a great place to go, so that's where I'll go."

I was struck by this when I saw a message from Rufus, Amazon's AI shopping concierge. Concerned, as always, about my well-being, Amazon had Rufus unprompted make suggestions about what deals I would like and what I should treat myself to. Apparently, a lot of people out there don't know what they want and need a machine to tell them what to

Result #4: Substitute Thinking for Feeling

do.  📍

The fourth result is that when the heart is silent, you try to substitute thinking for feeling.

Without the input of the heart, we try to think decisions through,  decisions that are outside the scope of practice of the cerebral cortex. It's like consulting an electrician about whether to get a beagle or a basset hound. We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, guided by enlightenment and motivated by the right and reasonable thing to do, but we're really guided by emotion, not reason.

We're just very talented at justifying our behavior as if it were, of course, the most reasonable thing that any prudent human being would do. So when we can't hear the heart, like AI that just hallucinates facts it doesn't know, we rationalize what we end up doing.

"Chocolate ice cream might keep me awake at night, so I'll eat vanilla instead." I really wanted vanilla, but I couldn't access the preference, so I found a, quote, reason to go one way or the other. And notice that I've chose my flavor, vanilla, advisedly here.

Emotions provide direction because they lead to our values, what's most important to us. They fuel our passions. Without them, we're paralyzed or at best wandering aimlessly. For example, when people don't have access or vocabulary for their feelings, they may go back and forth about commitment to a relationship. It's a very painful struggle. It's sometimes referred to as ROCD That is (relationship obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It originates in a lack of connection with the heart and an over-reliance on the

Result #5: Depression

mind.  📍

The fifth result is that we become depressed. One surprising thing about alexithymia is that it's associated with depression. Depression isn't exactly sadness,  though in our inexactitude we equate the two.

We sometimes use the word depression as a stand-in for sadness, grieving, disappointment, or discouragement. When you're in these emotional states, you still care. But when we're depressed, we may not care. Emotions seem absent. As I wrote in a previous post about depression, the absence of energy can be a warning from your heart that you've been caring too much about the wrong things.

The heart goes on strike until you get the point and change your ways.

But which causes which? Does the depression come first or does alexithymia? It goes both ways. Depression makes you more likely to be alexithymic, and alexithymia makes it more likely that you'll be depressed. It can also increase your odds of becoming suicidal or aggressive.

Rather than chase our tails with this, let's just say that when alexithymia is not addressed, we have less reason to be happy. If you don't desire anything, there's less to savor and less to look forward

Result #6: The Body Speaks for the Heart

to.   📍

Consequence 6: The Body Speaks for the Heart

And finally, sixth, the body expresses what the heart cannot. When our body expresses what we don't have words for, we call it somatization.  Soma means body. This could means that you get physically exhausted when you're really tired of something, but you can't say it. It could mean you vomit when faced with something you can't swallow. It could mean your skin breaks out to express your anxiety about getting close.

We need to be cautious about assuming that any of these symptoms are psychosomatic. You should always get cleared by a physician before you conclude that you're somatizing. Then, once doc clears you, consider your symptoms a possible back channel for prohibited

Reclaiming Emotion

communication.  📍

Now we're gonna talk about cure and that's too strong a word, but we're gonna talk about what you can do about it.

You can get better at knowing what you're feeling and at describing it, probably more  than you would imagine you could. But remember that progress is usually gradual, uneven, and measurable over months or even years, not

Psychotherapy for Alexithymia

weeks.

:   📍 First of all, psychotherapy helps. Research indicates that psychotherapy can help us to connect or reconnect with our feelings. Think of it as going back to school to learn  what no one ever taught you about growing up, that is, feelings. It would be unrealistic for us to imagine that even with optimal therapy and optimal self-help, we could all become fountains of emotional clarity. Some of us will always be better at this than others, but that doesn't mean those at the low or middle end of the scale can't enjoy a better connection with their heart.

Therapy aims to understand how we lost connection with our heart and what we're still doing to keep up those barriers. We also learn, through practice, to detect emotional signals that rarely reached consciousness before.

We tend to use a bottom-up approach, tuning into the body. We learn to be with the feelings without thinking we are the feeling or identifying the feelings. Recall that one of the causes of alexithymia is that emotions are actually too intense and too negative.

We can't separate treatment for suppression and repression from alexithymia. Holistic treatment includes understanding both why we suppress and repress and how we can build awareness of feelings and a vocabulary for them.

Individual or group therapy can be helpful both in providing structure and in providing opportunities to exercise connecting and labeling feelings.

Here are some of the ways it can be helpful: getting feedback. For instance, "Jim, you almost always look sad to me," or practicing identifying a feeling in the moment and expressing it. "It really pisses me off when you tell me what I'm feeling," or developing insight about your story. "I thought that as my therapist or my group leader, you'd affirm my feelings. You don't. You're worse than

Mindfulness Meditation

my   📍 parents."

So another technique for improving your connection with your feelings is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation can be helpful in that it structures  time for you to simply watch feelings as they come up without judging them. You sit down at a quiet time in a calm, quiet place, so you can hear things you didn't normally hear.

So try it right now. Slow down and pay attention to this very moment. If you try to meditate and nothing comes up, observe what the emptiness is like. Then ask whether it's pleasant or unpleasant. If that's hard, just note any judgment, the exercise, my suggestion, or about yourself. Have some compassion and patience for yourself.

But be mindful about how you use mindfulness. Some people think the purpose of meditation is to help us just bliss out. Wrong. It's about tuning

Tuning In: Practice Makes Connection

in.

:   📍 Let's talk about the other way to improve connection with the heart is through practice. Practice makes connection. Whether you use therapy or meditation or you work on your own,  here are some of the most helpful approaches to reconnecting with your heart.

There's no magic here. There's just practice. You either started with the volume turned down on feeling, or you've had to turn it down when things got too loud. In either case, we need to practice tuning in and turning up the volume.

Pay attention to your body. Learn to tune into it. There's a six-step technique called focusing, which is a great tool for this. You can find it at focusing.org.

Consider that there may be deeper layers of feeling than the one you may be faintly aware of. Notice that you may have more than one feeling at once.

You may only be aware of the feelings that are, quote, on top, missing the feelings underneath. Anger may be underneath anxiety. Anxiety may be underneath anger, and there may be anger under depression.

Whenever you're waiting in line at the grocery store, on hold on the telephone, or when your computer's warming up, just take a moment to try tuning into what's happening inside.

This might seem unrealistically simple, but chances are you've avoided it for years. Just as suppression may have become a habit, tuning in can become a habit as well.

So start with the basics and branch out.

If you're not sure what you're feeling, start by asking yourself whether your experience is pleasant or unpleasant. Then ask which of seven basic emotions you may be having. Imagine a radio signal coming from a distant planet that you have to concentrate on to tune into. This signal may be very faint at first, but tune into it by tuning into your body.

Take the risk that you may not get it just right. Don't let perfectionism get in your way. This is just beta, a work in progress that's always subject to tweaking.  📍

Seven Basic Emotions and Their Variations

  So, um,

I'm gonna list seven basic feelings here. Researchers, have come up with five or six, seven or even eight, but these are the ones I think might be most helpful for our purposes here. 

Fear, sadness, anger, joy, shame, disgust, and hurt. Once you can pick one of these, just as a ballpark emotion, then you can branch out into more nuanced expression. And I'm gonna, list those seven again, each with a few alternatives that might help you to tune in to a more specific feeling.

And keep checking in with your body to see if the term resonates. So under fear, other words for fear are frightened Anxious, terrified, concerned.

Other words for sadness might be despairing, hopeless, disappointed, empty, apathetic, worthless.

Other words for anger might include frightened, mad, frustrated, aversion, furious, explosive, enraged, irritated.

Other words for joy are ecstatic, happy, content, satisfied, proud.

Other words for shame could include remorse, guilt, embarrassed, rejected, inferior,

worthless.

Other words for disgust could include hate, loathing, aversion, judgmental, revulsion.

And other words for hurt could include violated, betrayed, humiliated, vulnerable, worthless   📍

You might also download an image from the internet that can show you many, many different levels of feelings so that you can tune in more.

 

  📍

 Finally, let go. In your effort to tune in, try to

Letting Go

monitor if you get tense or work too hard. Just notice. The  process is much more about letting go so you can hear what wants to be heard, allowing it to surface. If you notice yourself straining or forcing, that's a good start to connecting with naming and feeling.

While some of your emotions have been painful remember that there's an entire world of positive emotions in there as well. I hope that you can permit them safe passage. Your heart is waiting.

 ​

📍   📍 📍   📍 You can find transcripts of this podcast with links to research sources and lots more at The Healthy Compulsive blog, www.thehealthycompulsive.com. If you'd like to subscribe to The Healthy Compulsive podcast, hit that subscribe button. And for a thorough guide to cultivating the positive potential of the compulsive personality, find my book on Amazon, The Healthy Compulsive: Healing Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder and Taking the Wheel of the Driven Personality.

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